Sinai Tapestry (9 page)

A javelin thrown by a tribesman in the Yemen transfixed his jaw, destroying four back teeth and part of his palate. With the weapon still in his head Strongbow fought off the tribesmen with his club and spent the rest of the night walking to a coastal village where there was an Arab with sufficient understanding of anatomy to remove the javelin without taking his jaw with it.

The work was done but the jagged mark down the side of his face remained.

While swimming across the Red Sea under a full moon he fell victim to a fever that blistered his tongue with ulcers and made it impossible for him to speak for a month.

Near Aden, after secretly penetrating the holy sites of both Medina and Mecca disguised as an Arab, only the second European to have done so, he was stricken with another fever that he treated with opium. While largely unconscious he barely escaped being bled to death by a local midwife who solicitously shaved his body and plastered his groin with a thick mass of leeches.

Groin and palate and tongue, Strongbow early acquired scar tissue from his strenuous explorations. But it wasn’t these Levantine wounds that were to determine his future course in the Middle East. Rather it was certain unsuspected conversations he had on both love and a haj in Timbuktu, and not long after that, love itself in Persia.

Strongbow first learned of the man known as the White Monk of the Sahara in Tripoli, where the former peasant priest from Normandy had been an insignificant White Father missionary for some years before abruptly deciding one evening, after a long lonely afternoon spent lying in the dust under a palm tree, that the Christian dictum to love thy neighbor meant what it said. Abandoning his order and traveling south, he eventually crossed the wastes to Timbuktu.

There Father Yakouba, as the renegade peasant priest now called himself, became a nefarious legend throughout the desert because of his heretical message that love should be all-encompassing, so complete as to include sexual relations between large numbers of people all at once, strangers and families and whole neighborhoods tumbling together whenever they chanced to meet.

When many bodies are pressed together, preached the White Monk, the need for vanity vanishes. The alpha and the omega are one, coming and going are one, the spirit is triumphant and all souls enter holy communion. So God is best served when as many people as possible are making love day and night.

It is especially important, preached the White Monk, that no one should ever find himself alone and unoccupied and feeling excluded on a hot afternoon, gazing longingly at passing groups of people. Nor should passing groups of people stare defiantly at a solitary outsider. Instead both sides should mix at once in the love of God.

Even though Timbuktu was strictly a Moslem city, Father Yakouba’s Christian message was well-received from the beginning, perhaps because that caravan outpost was far from nowhere, perhaps as well because so many of its inhabitants were displaced villagers accustomed to knowing everyone they met.

In any case Father Yakouba was increasingly surrounded by enthusiastic converts of all ages and colors ranging from light brown to deep black, who in time produced a growing community of children until his polysexual commune accounted for fully half the population of Timbuktu, surpassing in size all but the largest towns between central Africa and the Mediterranean.

The story fascinated Strongbow the evening he heard it in an Arab coffee house. Before midnight he was out in the desert beyond Tripoli, magnifying glass in hand should any rare specimens appear in the moonlight, tramping south along the ancient Carthaginian trade route that led through Mizda and Murzuk to Lake Chad, a distance of thirteen hundred miles. There he paused to soak his feet at dusk and dawn before turning west to Timbuktu, a distance of twelve hundred miles.

As one of the first six or seven Europeans to arrive in the city since the Roman era, Strongbow expected at least some kind of welcome or demonstration when he appeared in its streets. But to his surprise no one took any notice of him, the place apparently so remote all events were equally plausible to its inhabitants. Although disappointed, Strongbow recorded this fact for future use and began asking directions to the White Monk.

The replies he received were useless. A man pointed backward and forward, a woman nodded to the right and left. Wearily he sat down in a dusty square holding the flowers he had picked that morning in the desert. There was nothing else to do so he examined them through his magnifying glass.

They’re very pretty, said a soft voice.

Strongbow peered under his magnifying glass at what appeared to be an elderly Arab dwarf. The tiny creature was smiling up at him. Some fifty or sixty children suddenly arrived to play in the square.

I’m an English botanist, said Strongbow.

Then you’re new here and you’re probably lonely.

At the moment I’m just tired.

Well won’t you come play with the little children then? That always helps.

With his magnifying glass Strongbow adjusted the dwarf to life-size.

Little man, I’ve just walked two and a half thousand miles to meet someone called the White Monk of the Sahara, and now that I’m here I can’t find him. So you see I don’t exactly feel like playing with little children.

L’appétit, said the dwarf, vient en mangeant.

Strongbow dropped his magnifying glass and the flowers slipped through his fingers as the tiny old man merrily wagged his head.

Didn’t they tell you I was a dwarf somewhat advanced in years?

No.

And so you pictured quite a different man?

Yes.

The dwarf laughed.

Well of course you’re still very young. Would you care to come to my house for some banana beer?

Strongbow smiled.

Which is your house, Father? No one was able to tell me.

Oh they told you all right, you must have been distracted by your walk. In this part of town all the houses are mine.

Father Yakouba guessed almost at once that Strongbow was deaf, the first person ever to do so. But when Strongbow asked him how he had known, the elderly man only nodded happily and poured more banana beer.

Just then two or three hundred children ran by the bench where they were sitting in a courtyard, the dust rising high in their wake and settling slowly as they swept away.

My birds of the desert, said Father Yakouba, passing from one hour of life to another. Prettily they come with their chirpings, lightly they go on their wings. And who is to chart their course but me? And where would they alight if not in my heart? Now and then I may miss a rainy day in Normandy, but down here a rainy day is a memory that belongs to another man. You walked over two thousand miles to get here but do you know I’ve often made such journeys in an afternoon following the flights of my children? Yes, their footprints in the sky. You haven’t begun it yet?

What’s that, Father?

Your haj.

No. I haven’t even considered one.

But you will of course, out here we all make one eventually. And when you do remember there are many holy places, and remember as well that a haj isn’t measured in miles no more than a man is measured by his shadow. And your destination? Jerusalem? Mecca? Perhaps, but it may also be a simpler place you’re looking for, a mud courtyard such as this or even a hillside where a few trees give shade in the heat of the day. It’s the haj itself that’s important, so what you want is a long and unhurried journey. A flight of birds just passed us, going from where to where in the desert? I don’t know, but when they alight I’ll have arrived at my holy place.

Father Yakouba leaned back against the mud wall, his face wrinkled into a thousand lines by the desert sun.

Will you go from plant to plant? he asked.

No, Father, I’m beginning to think not.

Good, from people to people then and a rich and varied journey is what you want, so pray you are slow in arriving. And when you meet someone along the way stop at once to talk and answer questions and ask your own as well, as many as you can. Curious habits and conflicting truths? Mirages as well? Embrace them all as you would your own soul, for they are your soul, especially the mirages. And never question the strange ways of others because you are as strange as they are. Just give them God’s gift, listen to them. Then you’ll have no regrets at the end because you’ll have traced the journey in your heart.

A haj, mused Strongbow, I hadn’t thought of it that way.

Father Yakouba smiled shyly.

It’s time for my afternoon nap now. Tell me, do you think you could do me a small favor when you return to Tripoli?

Anything at all, Father.

Do you think you could send me a bottle of Calvados? Would that be too much? It’s true we change our lives and banana beer is fine, but now and again I do recall a rainy day in Normandy.

They laughed together on that hot afternoon in a dusty courtyard in Timbuktu, laughed and parted and talked for several more weeks before Strongbow left to cross the Sahara once more, pausing again at Lake Chad to soak his feet at dusk and dawn.

In Tripoli, Strongbow arranged for the first of many shipments of Calvados to his new friend and also began that enthusiastic exchange of letters, later assumed to have been lost during the First World War, that was to become the most voluminous correspondence of the nineteenth century.

The following spring in Persia, during a cholera epidemic that killed seventy thousand people, Strongbow contracted a temporary and partial blindness that made it impossible for him to read books, but not lips. He made use of his time by having the Koran read to him so that he could memorize it. While convalescing he fasted and prayed and was subsequently ordained a Master Sufi when his eyesight returned.

But more important, at the beginning of that epidemic he had fallen in love with the mysterious Persian girl whose death was to haunt him for years. He only knew her for a few weeks, no more, before the epidemic carried her off, yet the memory of their tender love never left him. And it was while memorizing the Koran in his sorrow that he decided he would make a haj as Father Yakouba had suggested, when the time came, and that because of the gentle Persian girl it would be a sexual exploration into the nature and meaning of love.

Thus for many reasons Strongbow was, considered morbidly vain and pedantic by Englishmen in the Levant. The opinion was general and even universal, although it also had to be admitted that no one knew Strongbow at all.

Nor wanted to, as was made apparent at the lavish diplomatic reception given in Cairo in 1840 to honor Queen Victoria’s twenty-first birthday. The highest-ranking officials were there as well as the most important European residents in Egypt. Because of his imposing lineage Strongbow had to be invited, but of course no one imagined he would attend. A formal evening lawn party with reverent toasts to the queen was exactly what he could be expected to detest.

Yet Strongbow did appear, entirely naked.

Or rather, naked of clothes. As so often he wore his portable sundial strapped to his hip, a monstrously heavy bronze piece cast in Baghdad during the fifth Abbasid caliphate. But the huge sundial hung well to the side and its leather strap crossed his hips well above the groin, thereby concealing nothing.

Strongbow’s entrance was dignified, his step measured and even ponderous. He presented himself to the reception line and bowed his way gravely down it, then chose to position himself at the end of the garden in front of the orchestra, as conspicuous a spot as could be found.

There, alone and erect, he stood displaying his full figure of seven feet and seven inches without saying a word or moving a muscle, in one hand a bulging leather pouch, in the other his familiar and gigantic magnifying glass, which he kept close to his eye while gazing down on the waltzers.

For perhaps an hour he stood studying the dancers until he was evidently satisfied with his performance. Then he broke into a smile, laughed loudly and strode straight across the dance floor to the far side of the garden, where the wall was highest.

One leap carried him to the top of the wall. He shouted that he had once loved well in Persia and they could all go to hell, swung the sundial behind him and lingered a moment longer, dropping from sight with a whoop precisely as the clocks chimed midnight and announced the arrival of the queen’s birthday.

But so commanding was Strongbow’s presence and so bizarre his reputation, not one of the guests had seen his nakedness. All the comments made later had to do with his unpardonable rudeness in leaving at the moment he had, his raucous laughter and unseemly yelp upon doing so, his equally blatant reference to some obscene experience in Persia, his defiant exit over the wall instead of through a gate, the heavy bronze sundial he had once more insisted on wearing and tossing back and forth to impress people with his strength, and especially the great discomfort everyone had felt having that grotesquely large eye, two inches in diameter, staring down at them from its unnatural height.

Insofar as his attire or lack of it was concerned, it was assumed he had ignored propriety as usual and come in his normally outrageous costume, the massive greasy black turban and the shaggy short black coat made from unwashed and uncombed goats’ hair.

Outrageous behavior as usual, but that night in 1840 when he climbed over a garden wall wickedly flashing a smile and shaking his sundial and shouting about love, his nakedness unrecognized, was the last time anyone would ever see the giant in his guise as Strongbow.

The sundial and the gigantic magnifying glass were both remembered from that night but not the other article he had with him, the bulging leather pouch. In fact he had to walk many blocks to a poor section of the city before he met a blind beggar who could relieve him of it.

Or rather a miserable old man sitting in a squalid alley with a cup in his lap pretending to be blind. When Strongbow’s shadow approached the beggar began his whining chant, but when the apparition was closer the old man’s eyes jumped even though he had trained himself for years never to let them register a thing.